Is this thing on …? Woohoo!

17 thoughts on Is this thing on …? Woohoo!

1. Oh great! I very much miss your posts on Open Left. Glad to hear you’ve settled at SEIU. And with bunny pics!

   I think I have largely the same political beliefs as my mother’s side going back to her grandmother, at the very least. My earliest memories of political indoctrination are when my mom would play songs at the piano, which meant a lot of Woody Guthrie and stuff like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” As a creative-ish child, probably the most direct line into my, I dunno, world philosophies was that kind of imaginative stimulation. I still have a really vivid (completely imaginary) picture in my head of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos, and of some fictive rusty barbed wire fence with a sign saying “No Tresspassin.” She also gave my sister and I a lot of fairy tales. We would always have these fairy tales of the world books, and there would be a lot of cross-cultural versions of the same rudimentary story. I think that probably fomented a sense of tolerance and curiosity about the larger world, and it seems appropriate that my sister ended up working at an NGO for human rights in Asia for many years.

   My dad’s family was pretty politically inconsistent- his mother is a clinical narcissist, so he really didn’t inherit a structured belief system. But he’s a geochemist, and I think that progressivism would inevitably suit his data oriented mind. And he raised us to resist arbitrary structures and order. When they dumbed down science in elementary school, he made it clear that he thought it was bullshit (and he did probably use that word, too) and wrong. So we have zero respect for unearned authority, my sister and I, probably by nature and nurture.

   I’m always kind of intrigued by people who had something to rebel against, because I never really did. But I grew up in a hyper-conformist DC suburb, so as a child I craved a conventionality that was never an option. So I suppose I’ve rebelled against that hyper-conformity, for sure, and I get pretty jittery in and around suburbia.

   It *is* interesting how we can all start off from radically different perspectives and end up in largely the same philosophical place. And: I look forward to your posts!

2. Both of my parents were, I believe, more liberal than they would ever feel comfortable advertising. They wanted to fit in, so they never made their true inner leanings public knowledge. Still, they also had strong conservative streaks, which they usually returned to in periods of difficulty.

   And me? Well, I feel as though I learned from that which they chose to kept concealed and found that more to my liking. In some ways, my father and I have always had a difficult relationship because I’m open about my liberal beliefs and he resents that I don’t feel similarly constrained.

3. This is interesting. My parents are immigrants from Cuba and are conservative and right-wing, especially my dad’s side of the family. But while I can see where they come from, I don’t share they’re beliefs. I guess you could say I’m sort of an anarchist with some libertarian tendencies, especially in terms of lifestyle rather than economics, which can be really impractical and harsh. I can see why people vote for either side, but don’t tell me what I can do and I won’t tell you what to do. I don’t like either party or most politicians and extremists on either side annoy me, to quote the Isley Brothers, It’s your thing and do what you wanna do/ I can’t tell you who to sock it to 🙂

4. My parents are both liberal black sheep from conservative families. That said, I think class issues factor into the ideological differences between me and them: coming from working-class backgrounds, their attitude toward the world is one of “keep your nose out of trouble and mind your own backyard.” In other words, the world is full of people who would love to screw you over if they could, so it’s best to just play by the rules and make yourself scarce.

   This POV doesn’t work so well in college when you have professors asking you how much you’ve engaged with your community. It took me years (and is still taking me years) to come around to the idea that I have the power to change things outside of my immediate experience. When I mention any small bit of activism I’ve done, my mother always responds by telling me I’m “over-thinking things” or “taking too much on” and “you can’t change the world so you should just focus on your own life.” But I can’t help @feministhulk SMASH THE PATRIARCHY by keeping my head down!

5. My politics are well to the left of my liberal parents’ politics, partly because of being an avid reader (SF – yay!), partly because of political influence of spouse, partly because I have, for various reasons, developed a “double vision” of society around me – seeing the stories we’re told about our culture, and the reality of how it plays out on our bodies and communities. I have been busy having a number of in-depth conversations on class reductionism, with one four-hour discussion to come on Saturday. So, if you post on that, I’ll jump in, reading suggestions & all.

6. And I’m curious … If you’re someone who ended up with very different beliefs than the people who raised you, how did that happen? If you feel that your beliefs are mostly similar to those of your caregivers, how did that happen?

   To some extent I like to think my views are the evolution of my parent’s best hopes which is why I’ve been able to drag them along with me as I’ve become increasingly liberal. The most important lesson I learned from them was compassion. Granted they tried to teach me other things to…fundamentalist Christian “virtues” for the most part…but the thing that pushed me to liberalism was compassion. It started during adolescence with compassion for my friends who I knew were doing things that were “wrong” but I knew they were acting from love and then just snowballed from there…much to my parent’s dismay.

   And arguments from compassion have worked backwards on them. They went from being opposed to interracial marriage when I was a small child to supporting gay marriage today.

   My dad still calls himself a republican although he hasn’t voted R in more than a decade…

7. My parents are extremely conservative fundamentalist christians. I have the exact opposite of my parents’ self-identified beliefs on just about everything. I say self-identified, because they aren’t much for practicing what they preached in areas about which they were informed.

   My dad is a scientist who deals with energy. And he’s smart; he knows the issues. For example: He knows, for instance, that capitalism is going to encourage the building of lots of piddly little coal-powered plants because you just want to add a little capacity at a time so you can charge people as much as possible. And obviously it’s much more efficient to build fewer, larger, more efficient plants, as green as our current technology will allow us to build. So we should, on just this one area, have lots of government regulation. You wouldn’t have known he was the same guy who went to church every Sunday and always voted Republican from the way he railed against California’s energy deregulation. He can’t see by analogy that the same arguments might be true with respect to anything else because government is bad and all that.

   My mom is similar. by nature, she’s a very liberal person, but she thinks she’s got to be conservative to be a Christian. It’s fucking depressing watching her wind herself up before an election. She goes through a several-week process of talking herself out of voting for what she believes in and into voting the way her church tells her Christians ought to vote.

   So… I’m a liberal atheist. I couldn’t deal with the mental demands of holding so many conflicting beliefs. But on some level, I’m exactly what you’d get if you took my parents more sensible beliefs and behaviors and eliminated all the inconsistent ones.

8. My views about most things – although the biggies are religion and politics – are so different to my parents’ that they have often accused me of simply being contrary.

   When I question my mom’s beliefs, she falls back on “well, that’s just the way I was raised.” However, when I reply that I was raised the same way, she generally blusters and changes the subject.

9. Hi Natasha! I’m looking forward to reading your posts.

   I’m really interested in this idea of SF moving you leftward. Now, I was introduced to SF at twelve and read it avidly for many years, and wound up quite a lefty, but when I go back and think on it, a lot of the SF I read had pretty fucked up politics, closer to libertarianism. Also, when I tried to write SF, I found that the politics that always came out in my writing were things I really, really didn’t believe in, which suggested to me I had absorbed and was repeating back some genre-specific tropes or something — anyway, I wonder if you and others could say more about which authors and works specifically influenced you? That could be a really interesting discussion!

   I guess the one SF thing I can think of that did move me leftward was the Gateway series by Fred Pohl, which is set in a world where if you are super rich you can buy unlimited health insurance, and there’s good enough technology to put off death for quite a long time, and the poor sometimes offer themselves up to be killed and have their body parts harvested in order to get money for their families. I could definitely see the line from point A to point B, and argued for a european-style health care system long before it was on most people’s radar screens.

   In thinking about how I got to be as lefty as I am — such an interesting question — I think you could boil it down to what has been a long search for more justice in the world, and some unpleasant personal experiences that helped me see the world, if only briefly, as a less privileged person might. My parents were standard white liberals and I adopted their worldview eagerly. We were much more liberal than most folks in our small southern town, but I was not introduced to feminist thought nor did I learn to question the standard white liberal assumptions about race, and the “colorblind” racial ideology that goes with them, until much later in life.

   I tried so many things in my search for a better world that you could make a joke of my inconsistency, and my dad has. The arts (which left too little time for other interests), evangelical Christianity (too racist, who knew?), Democratic party politics (grrrrrrrr), and now labor organizing. Which, we’ll see how that goes. I have a good feeling.

   What do you do for SEIU besides the blog, can you tell us?

10. Just wanted to say I’m looking forward to reading your posts, espcially because you have apparently actually read Adam Smith – as opposed to quoting one line from one chapter and running with it 🙂

    I love class/wealth discussions.

11. @human

    My title is online campaign manager, so I also help the national and local child care/early learning campaigns with email and social media strategies. It’s not a secret, it’s just not much to link to 😉

    And as for getting a lefty bent from scifi, I think there are far more explicitly outlined political systems in the genre that are some kind of libertarian/authoritarian than there are liberal ones. You regularly run into monarchies and autocracies; possibly because it’s hard to portray democracy well, possibly because it seems more dramatic.

    Even Star Trek, which probably portrayed the most enlightened political system I can think of offhand, had all the action happen on military vessels.

    I think what makes scifi a great medium of humanist philosophy is mostly a) the way alien species are humanized, b) the tendency for the protagonists, at least, to tend to hew to strongly egalitarian mores and c) the strong tendency of scifi tv and film to pass the Bechdel test and even have female leads. If you can empathize with an alien, and come to think of someone green as a fellow traveler, I think it becomes harder to justify racism to yourself. If the people you’re identifying with in stories are always fighting for a better world, even if it only exists in their minds, then that begins to seem like a less hinky vocation. If you grew up seeing Alien and Terminator, you’ve been exposed to some of the rarest of movie fare: female leads in movies that weren’t classified primarily as women’s entertainment.

    Also, it’s been shown that fiction may increase people’s capacity for empathy. While they didn’t try that with science fiction, I can’t imagine that a few ray guns thrown into a narrative prevents the basic empathic process taking root.

    So it seems like a complex of all those factors. And I’ve gone on before about how Star Trek showed the first interracial kiss on TV. Even though it was still a bfd when Babylon 5 did something similar years later, again, you’re also seeing relationships between humans and aliens in the story and if you’re just watching the show it’s not something that can really stand out as too odd. Although it must be granted that space is portrayed as still being pretty white on film, even the people under the alien makeup, usually. DS9 is probably the best on that score that leaps readily to mind.

    And how can you not give props to BSG for having a wide array of female characters who weren’t there as scenery, who weren’t there primarily as love interests, who had positions of authority and interacted with each other regularly about all kinds of things? The book market for scifi is a mix, unsurprisingly, but also a great place to go for strong female characters who do more than chase romantic fulfillment.

    @everyone – Great reading, and what a fun welcome 🙂

12. I have to say that the only SciFi I’ve read is the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, which I love. I’m now currently reading an amazing book of non-fiction essays by her, including one where she critiques her own critiques of that book.

    Welcome!

13. Also, I am left of my left of parernts. Actually my dad is pretty apolitical, as much as one can be, and likes to scream at me that I need to learn to compromise*. My mother is quite liberal, but not much for rocking the boat (an environmental lawyer who works for the government). My father has poor empathy, while my mother has too much – to that point that she can’t talk about much I would want to discuss because so many things give her nightmares.

    *In the context of my saying why I now dislike Maryland Rep Chris Van Hollen who support Stupak “in the name of the party,” even after the health care debacle.

14. I suppose I largely followed my parents ideas but then they taught me to think about my views and argue for them logically. So when someone presents a better argument I will change my opinion.

    Reading SF tends to make you think of alternatives. A lot of authors explore different societies and political systems. Some are horrible, others idealistic but they challenge the view that what we have at present is the best or even only way. Thinking about alternatives leads to trying to improve what we have which is essentially the liberal position. Incidently I wouldn’t reject ideas which are libertarian just because US libertarians are selective in what freedoms they support.

15. I grew up one of six, homeschooled, evangelical Christian children. Dobson, Rush, Dr. Laura, Liddy and Christian radio EVERY day – I was very much a true believer. My evolution away, was slow and gradual beginning when I went away to a Christian College that was relatively “liberal” (using that term very loosely). Growing up, I was pretty much terrified of everyone – because my parent’s beliefs taught me that EVERYONE who did not think exactly like us, were in fact without morals and quite dangerous (spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically) – and little by little I met amazing, loving people who were a part of the “other” groups my parents talked so much about, and as a result, I began to accept that maybe, just maybe, my parents got this little portion wrong. As time went on, and person after person I met defied all that I was told they were, I began to ask very small questions to myself and allow very controlled doubts into mt thoughts. Plus I had amazing, intelligent and loving women in my life that helped me process and sort through issue after issue. I am now 27, loving my life and now able to enjoy all who I meet, but the cost it that I have lost moral credibility in the eyes of my parents (I also live with my fiance – VERY bad :)) and I am clearly a “backslider” whose soul is in jeopardy.

16. My grandparents were reds. My parents are liberals, with all of the possible shortcomings that implies. I grew up on kids’ stories clipped from Ms. Magazine. I think I took them to heart more than my mother did.

    I fantasize about making out with Emma Goldman while my girlfriend watches.

    I know I’m hopping on an old thread, but your money post made me coma back and read all of the stuff you’ve posted here. Thanks.

17. This question is fascinating to me because I am raising a daughter in Texas and, as much as I try to fight it, I secretly want her to value the same things I do. So the more clues I get, the better. I think I’ll start by keeping the box of vintage sci-fi books, which I inherited from my own mother, half-hidden away in the attic for her to find one day. 😉

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